Obstacles of Conventional to Automation in Clinical Microbiology

Automation is the technology that makes it possible for a process or procedure to be used without human involvement. Many of the automated procedures have been implemented in clinical biochemistry and clinical haematology where most of which operate on blood or urine and only use a few standard tube sizes. However, the fact that different clinical specimen types are received in different types of containers for various tests with varied processing techniques is a challenge for automated solutions in clinical microbiology laboratories. Thus, instead of total laboratory automation, varying degree of automation have been frequently adopted in different stages of sample processing and reporting in the microbiology laboratories to diagnose diseases. Furthermore, there are many obstacles of conventional to automation in clinical microbiology, such as requirement of flexibility in decision making while reporting by microbiologists, frequent emergence of new microbial strains, e.g., antimicrobial resistant bacteria, high-cost and large space requirement in automation and requirement of extended validation, thereby adding the cost of laboratory in addition to patient diagnostics.